In the prosecutions of Edmund Campion and his fellow priests for treason, Queen Elizabeth’s government confronted what it perceived to be an overtly political threat to England’s security. The scale of the mission to save English souls, which was directed with so much passion and energy by William Allen, speaks for itself. The total number of priests sent into England – 471 are known to have been active in the kingdom over forty years – is a powerful indication of the mission’s significance. Each one of those priests was to Elizabeth’s government a stirrer of sedition and treason, an agent of political conspiracy, whose purpose was to corrupt the queen’s subjects and reconcile them to the Church of Rome. The priests were the Pope’s footsoldiers in Rome’s war against Elizabeth. Lord Burghley called them ‘these seminaries, secret wanderers, and explorators [scouts, spies] in the dark’, ‘the wicked flock of the seedmen of sedition’.
The response of the Elizabethan authorities was uncompromising. Of the 471 priests, 116 were executed; at least 294 were sent to prison; 17 died in jail; and 91 were eventually banished from England. To William Allen those priests who suffered on the gallows were glorious Catholic martyrs murdered in a vicious persecution. Edmund Campion was the most inspirational and potent martyr of all. As early as May 1582 Allen was distributing fragments of Campion’s ‘holy rib’ as relics.
William Allen was a committed enemy of Queen Elizabeth’s government and her Church. He wrote books and pamphlets to counter the arguments of Elizabeth’s advisers and clergy and even to maintain the power of popes to depose monarchs who disobeyed God’s will. At first in his books he did not criticize Elizabeth directly, though when he did so, just before the Great Armada of 1588, he was ferocious in denouncing a bastard heretic queen. Always there was a single-mindedness about Allen that made him dangerous: his pen and his powers of organization were powerful weapons in a war for religion. ‘This is the way, by which we hope to win our nation to God again,’ he wrote on behalf of the priests of the English mission in 1581. They did not, he said, put their trust in princes or plots or force of arms.
But here Doctor Allen was disingenuous. From the late 1570s all the way through the following decade, not a day went by when he did not look to the Catholic invasion of his homeland. William Allen would save England from the consuming disease of Protestant heresy by whatever means were necessary, even if what he viewed as a criminal clique of persecuting atheists – Elizabeth’s Privy Council – denounced and convicted him as a traitor.
There was someone else, however, who surpassed even Allen’s proven ability to threaten the Elizabethan state. While Allen directed the operations of the English mission from mainland Europe – sometimes from Rheims, sometimes from Rome – she was held in custody in England as Queen Elizabeth’s unwanted guest. She was celebrated by Catholic exiles to be rightful heir to the Tudor crown. She was Elizabeth’s rival and, as Elizabeth herself recognized very clearly, the greatest danger to her throne. She, of course, was Mary Queen of Scots.
Mary Stuart presented Elizabeth’s advisers with the most complicated political and dynastic problem of the whole reign. To Catholics like Allen she was queen-in-waiting, by blood a descendant of Elizabeth’s grandfather King Henry VII. With no obvious Protestant successor ever endorsed by Elizabeth – she refused to the end of her life to nominate who would succeed her to the English throne – the future of Protestant England was horribly precarious. King Philip of Spain, the Pope and Mary’s family the Guise watched and waited; the Queen of Scots was the hope of Catholic Europe. Even after Mary’s execution by the English government in 1587, the memory of her cause and the international consequences of her killing continued to shape Elizabethan history in powerful ways. Mary Queen of Scots – whether ruling in Scotland, or a prisoner in England, or a Catholic martyr – cast a very long shadow indeed.
When Mary had landed on the coast of Cumberland in 1568 her monarchy was deeply compromised. She was an escapee from the prison of Lochleven Castle. Deposed by her enemies in Scotland, and strongly suspected by many of having been involved in the murder of her second husband, Henry, Lord Darnley, in 1567, she came to England to beg Elizabeth’s family affection in setting her back upon her throne. Under the strong advice of her councillors, Elizabeth refused to meet her cousin. Recognizing the profound difficulty of Mary’s case, Elizabeth appointed a tribunal to examine the Casket Letters, the supposed evidence of Mary’s complicity in Darnley’s death and her adultery with the Earl of Bothwell. The documents were held by Elizabeth’s government to be genuine, though this claim has been strongly doubted by historians. Indeed Lord Burghley himself knew they contained some crude forgeries. But if the Casket Letters were shown to be authentic then Mary and her queenship were fatally compromised. The tribunal that met at York and then in Westminster late in 1568 formally recognized the documents’ authenticity. This was proof enough for Elizabeth’s advisers that the Queen of Scots had been involved in a murder conspiracy against her husband. Though in 1568 not found guilty by a court of justice in England, Mary was sent by Elizabeth to Tutbury Castle in Staffordshire to be held indefinitely under close supervision. The deposed Queen of Scots was forbidden to communicate with any outsider without Elizabeth’s knowledge and permission.
On balance it was probably less dangerous to Elizabeth’s government to hold Mary safely in England than either to return her to Scotland or to send her to France. But safe custody in secure castles and houses in England was merely the best of the three choices. However she was dealt with, Mary was dangerous. The Ridolfi Plot of 1571 revealed to Elizabeth’s advisers precisely how pernicious she was, sitting comfortably at the centre of a web of conspiracy whose four principal threads were money from the Pope, a plan for an invasion of England led by a Spanish general, the liberation of Mary herself and the plottings of powerful English Catholic nobility. The most disturbing revelation of all in 1571 was the treason of Thomas Howard, fourth Duke of Norfolk, a cousin of Elizabeth’s through the Howard family of Anne Boleyn. Norfolk was found to be a Ridolfi conspirator. Parliament in 1572 responded robustly, sensitive to the plain if uncomfortable fact that, though ignored by the Act of Succession of 1544, Mary Stuart was Elizabeth’s blood successor. What the political establishment of Elizabethan England faced in 1571 and 1572 – as at many moments of political emergency in Elizabeth’s long reign – was the appalling prospect of the queen’s death with no acceptable royal successor, provoking a foreign invasion and probably also a civil war. After the breaking up of the Ridolfi Plot, parliament pressed for three courses of action. First, cut off the heads of the Queen of Scots and the Duke of Norfolk. Secondly, strip Mary of any pretensions to monarchy. Third, find and establish by parliamentary statute Queen Elizabeth’s royal successor: the future could not be left to accident and chance. Significantly, there was very strong support, nourished by the Privy Council, for Mary Stuart’s trial and execution. Elizabeth, however, resisted parliament’s advice on all but one of the proposed courses of action.
The Duke of Norfolk paid the price of the Ridolfi conspiracy, for in 1572 he went to the executioner’s block as a traitor. Terrified of the political consequences at home and abroad of eliminating a blood kinswoman and a fellow monarch, Elizabeth refused to be pressed on Mary by her Lords, Commons and Privy Council. Lawyers in parliament trawled the history of Europe for examples of kings brought to justice by fellow monarchs. The Emperor Henry VII, they found, gave a judgment of death against Robert, King of Naples at Pisa in 1311; Frederick, King of Naples was deposed by King Ferdinand of Aragon in 1501. The lawyers gathered together dozens of legal principles and maxims, many having to do with the fact that the Queen of Scots had been deposed by her own people and was thus no longer a queen. Bishops in the House of Lords quoted texts from the Old Testament to prove Elizabeth’s duty to execute Mary. Still Elizabeth was unmoved. Both houses of parliament set to work on a bill to exclude the Queen of Scots from the English succession, seeking to disable Mary’s claim to the Tudor crown. The bill, which was turned by Lords and Commons into one ‘wherewith the Queen of Scots may be charged’ judicially, was quashed by Elizabeth. It was an effort to deal definitively and robustly with the dynastic danger presented to Elizabeth by Mary; the queen, who was quite aware of what she was doing, merely adjourned parliament before the law could be passed. The best statute that could be used against the Queen of Scots remained the Treasons Act of 1571 and those of its clauses which prohibited any claim upon or usurpation of Elizabeth’s title and crown. So far as Elizabeth’s advisers were concerned, this was a very flimsy defence against evil.
And that was how in 1572 – the year of Elizabethan crisis, a turning point of decision and direction – those who moved in political circles at the royal court and in the Council saw it. The great massacre of Protestants in Paris in August of that same year, at the feast of Saint Bartholomew, offered further grim evidence of European Catholic conspiracy. The Devil was seen to be at work against the people of God. The events of Bartholomewtide caused Elizabeth’s government to re-evaluate the international situation it found itself facing. So it was that Robert Beale, later one of Edmund Campion’s interrogators and a man close to both Sir Francis Walsingham and Lord Burghley, was prompted by ‘the great murder in Paris and other places in France’ to write a discourse, or political paper, for Burghley.
Beale’s analysis in 1572 was stark, even terrifying. The killings in France, he believed, reflected the efforts of Catholic princes to destroy Protestantism throughout Europe in a campaign either waged openly in war or by treason and malice in secret. There was a ‘detestable conspiracy’ to divide the world into a new triumvirate of Spanish, French and papal power. Together Spain and France planned to conquer England. The foundations set down for the coming invasion were the defence of Mary Queen of Scots’s title to Elizabeth’s throne and Pope Pius V’s bull of 1570 denouncing Elizabeth as a schismatic and usurper. The ambitious house of Guise, Mary Stuart’s family, manipulated the monarchy of France and sought to confront and destroy Elizabeth probably by poison. Without a sure royal succession after Elizabeth’s death, England stood alone and defenceless against evil. Beale remembered the destruction of two leaders of the European Protestant cause, Louis of Bourbon, Prince of Condé, who was killed in battle in 1569, and Admiral Coligny, murdered in Paris in 1572. All European Protestants were in danger. The King of France himself had ordered the killings in Paris. In the Low Countries the forces of the Prince of Orange, leading the Dutch against the Duke of Alba’s Spanish army, were weak. Beale wrote:
It is therefore time and more than time that Her Majesty were thoroughly resolved to take some right course [for] both her own safety and wealth of this realm … The French King is become a man or rather an incarnate devil. The Prince of Condé and Admiral be slain. The Spaniard is placed in the Low Countries. The Prince of Orange’s forces be like after this to be so weakened as he shall never be able to lift up his head again. We are left destitute of friends on every side, amazed [stunned, overwhelmed] and divided at home: and consider not that where there is any such irresoluteness and security, that estate [state or kingdom] cannot in policy upon any foreign invasion (as is intended against this), continue long.
It was a brutal and cheerless analysis of the international scene.
Beale doubted very much whether English Catholics could ever be trusted by the queen. He wrote in private what Elizabethan officials, sensitive to the charge of orchestrating a religious persecution in England, were always relucant to say in public. Catholics, Beale said, could never be loyal subjects of Elizabeth. He reasoned thus: it was impossible for those whose religion, founded upon the Pope’s authority, believed both the queen’s birth and her title to the English throne to be unlawful. What confidence, he asked, ‘can be reposed in him, who thinketh in conscience under the damnation of his soul, to owe a more obedience to a higher power’? For an Elizabethan Protestant Beale’s logic was unassailable.
Beale had no illusions about the pernicious influence of Mary Queen of Scots. She was the principal cause of the ruin of the kingdoms of Scotland and France and she had ‘prettily played the like part’ in England. ‘All wise men generally throughout Europe cannot sufficiently marvel at Her Majesty’s over mild dealing with her, in nourishing in her own bosom so pestiferous a viper.’ He suggested a tough course of action to be taken against Mary. To disable the Queen of Scots from the English succession – the policy pushed by Lords and Commons and the Privy Council in parliament but subverted by Elizabeth in 1572 – was merely ‘a toy’, a trifle and a fantasy. To eliminate Mary once and for all was the only sure way. Beale’s political logic was that the malice of Spain and France, being profound already, could not be ‘augmented’ by Mary’s death. It would be better to be rid of her and take the consequences of her elimination sooner rather than later.
Robert Beale’s analysis appealed politically and instinctively to Lord Burghley, Sir Francis Walsingham and other privy councillors. But Elizabeth would not be moved, fearing above all the shattering consequences of stripping away the divine sanction of monarchy by killing the Queen of Scots; and so Mary lived. What followed after 1572 were fifteen years of uneasy and unstable peace between England and the princes and powers of Europe and some very busy plotting on behalf of Mary’s cause. It was just as Beale had predicted. For the rest of her life the Queen of Scots and her household were moved between places of safety and seclusion deep in the English midlands, away from London, the coasts and the sensitive borderland with Scotland, under the supervision of custodians and keepers appointed by Elizabeth. Elizabeth’s government knew that it had to isolate Mary as best as it could in order to cut off her contacts in England and abroad.
Mary was not cowed by her imprisonment. In fact she seemed to speak and to act with more confidence than her royal cousin of England, forcefully stating her rights even at the most difficult times. In June 1572, when members of the House of Lords and House of Commons were busily looking at the precedents for trying and executing monarchs, Mary wanted to go before parliament to state her own case. While Elizabeth resisted the efforts of her Privy Council and parliament to deal with Mary robustly, the Queen of Scots was just as confidently sure of her blood, parentage and right of next succession to the English crown. Significantly, knowing full well what the implications were, Mary resisted the views of lawyers in the House of Lords by refusing to submit to the legal jurisdiction of her cousin. The Queen of Scots – the unqueened queen, deposed in Scotland, a prisoner in England – always stood proudly upon the dignity of monarchy.
But Mary was above all a realist. She knew that Elizabeth’s government wanted to suffocate her influence. She appealed to King Philip of Spain; he was sympathetic to her situation but too busy on the many fronts of Spanish imperial power to devote either time or energy to her cause. With her cousin, Henry, Duke of Guise, she had more success. In fact the young duke became one of her most enthusiastic and active supporters in Europe. In 1578 he talked to King Philip’s ambassador, as well as to William Allen, about Mary and her young son, King James VI of Scotland. Mary’s situation was always tangled up with greater projects: to free the Queen of Scots without a vision for the rescue of England from Elizabethan tyranny – or indeed to have restored a Catholic England without a royal successor to Elizabeth – never made much sense. The liberation of the Queen of the Scots and the end of Elizabeth’s heretical rule belonged together in the minds of Europe’s Catholic leaders and English Catholic exiles. And so it was that in the early 1580s the Duke of Guise, with the help of Jesuit priests, began to look to the practical details of a plan to free Mary as well as to save England and Scotland from pernicious heresy.
In 1581 Robert Persons, Edmund Campion’s companion and superior in their mission to England, began to think seriously about Catholic prospects of success in Scotland. A Catholic Scotland could offer a safe haven for persecuted English Catholics. Its young king, James VI, had been raised by his mother’s enemies and given a thorough classical education and an uncompromisingly Protestant upbringing. In the early years of his rule Scotland was governed through Protestant regents who fought the kingdom’s Catholic nobility. But James, by now fifteen years old, was growing in ability and confidence. Might he, English and Scottish Catholics wondered, be persuaded to become a Catholic? James’s favourite at court was his cousin Esmé Stuart, first Duke of Lennox, who was perceived to exercise great influence over the king. Here the Duke of Guise, Robert Persons and William Allen saw their best chance of success. Indeed Lennox himself proposed a scheme to restore the Catholic religion in England, Ireland and Scotland, as well as to free the Queen of Scots and to secure the return of Catholic exiles and émigrés to their homelands. Lennox envisaged an invading force of 15,000 foreign troops. He and James would lead Scottish and Spanish troops in Scotland. The Duke of Guise would bring an army across the English Channel from France to land on the south coast of England. The rebel Earl of Westmorland and other English exiles would return to England to raise and arm their tenants. Together, by invasion and rebellion, they would push Elizabeth off the throne and liberate the Queen of Scots.
It was a bold plan to which many – the Duke of Guise especially – gave time, money and resources. But in the end it was hamstrung by changing political circumstances, principally the fall from influence at James’s court of the Duke of Lennox and also by the cooling of King Philip of Spain’s support for Guise’s plan. Nevertheless, the duke’s unwavering commitment touched off in England in late 1583 and early 1584 one of the most energetic of the many Elizabethan hunts for conspiracy and conspirators in England. It is known as the Throckmorton Plot, and it is one of the secret threads of the following chapters, involving a young Catholic gentleman called Francis Throckmorton, the Earl of Northumberland, Lord Paget and one of the most elusive of Elizabethans, Lord Henry Howard.
So the Queen of Scots, held against her will in England, had to wait and hope. She depended completely upon her friends. From Paris her supporters and agents tried to send her political and diplomatic intelligence in letters that were brought to her with great difficulty from mainland Europe, smuggled under the noses of Mary’s keepers. The couriers who carried these packets were zealous young English Catholic gentlemen. Their secret work greatly interested Sir Francis Walsingham and his spies. After all, what else could these letters contain but evidence of Mary’s plottings with Queen Elizabeth’s enemies? The truth was discovered in the summer of 1586 in probably the most stunning and controversial of all Elizabethan plots, the conspiracy of Anthony Babington, where we have the chance to follow every twist and turn of Walsingham and his quarry.
To invasion and conspiracies to liberate the Queen of Scots we may add the fear of Queen Elizabeth’s assassination. Poison was always a danger; Robert Beale had mentioned it specifically in his frank and worrying analysis of the international scene in 1572. In later sixteenth-century Europe there was something of a fashion for killing important men by firearms. In 1563 the second Duke of Guise, the Queen of Scots’s uncle, was shot in the back by a young gentleman assassin using a pistol. The first political killing by firearm in the British Isles was that of the Earl of Moray, a Protestant regent of Scotland (in fact Mary Stuart’s half-brother), who was murdered in 1570 by an assassin firing a harquebus, a heavy musket supported on a tripod. The same kind of gun was going to be used to assassinate Lord Burghley in Westminster in 1571 in a plot allegedly commissioned by the Spanish ambassador at Elizabeth’s court. The murder plot was revealed to Burghley by one of the would-be assassins, who, instead of finding a reward, went to the gallows. Most shocking of all to Europe’s Protestants was the murder, again by pistol, of William of Nassau, Prince of Orange, the leader of Dutch resistance against Spain, in 1584.
Over time, pistols became an assassin’s weapon of choice. A pistol, or dag, was much easier to conceal and use than a heavy harquebus, though given the accuracy of firearms in the sixteenth century the killer still had to be very close to his target to be sure of hitting it. In England the law said that a gentleman could keep and carry a pistol if he had the handsome income of at least £100 a year and if the pistol measured ‘stock and gun’ at least a yard in length. Elizabeth’s government was certainly nervous about the use of firearms. In 1579 a royal proclamation on handguns condemned ‘the multitude of the evil-disposed who … do commonly carry such offensive weapons being in time of peace only meet for thieves, robbers and murderers’. Constables were encouraged to stop anyone carrying a pistol whatever their rank and degree in society. But if thieves carried weapons, then it was sensible for travellers to do the same. It was said that an honest traveller rode out with a case of dags at his saddle-bow – that is, his weapons in plain sight on the arched front part of his horse’s saddle.
There were royal assassination scares. The most striking (and in many ways quite the most bizarre) was in October 1583, when a Catholic gentleman of Warwickshire called John Somerville set out from home to kill the queen with his dag. He was quickly arrested for speaking treasonable words against Elizabeth before five witnesses: ‘he was in hope to see the Queen’s Majesty and he meant to shoot her through with his dag and hoped to see her head to be set upon a pole for that she was a serpent and a viper’. Here was a textbook treason for which the Treasons Act of 1571 was perfected fitted. The officials who investigated Somerville doubted his sanity, believing that his mind had been turned and twisted by the influence of his wife, a priest in disguise and an illegal Catholic book – quite possibly (even probably) a work by William Allen of Rheims. One very sinister fact was that Somerville carried with him on his mission an Agnus Dei, a small wax lamb of God blessed by the Pope, an object of Catholic devotion. Master Somerville got nowhere near the queen – he was arrested in a village in Oxfordshire – but the fact that he was interrogated by Sir Francis Walsingham himself shows just how seriously the government believed the threat to Elizabeth’s life to be. Somerville was judged sane enough to stand trial for treason. He was found guilty but hanged himself in his cell in Newgate prison before he could be taken to the gallows.
Elizabeth’s advisers knew the queen’s killing could quickly bring England to its knees. They saw and felt the horror of the Prince of Orange’s assassination in 1584. The terrible, insistent question asked by Elizabeth’s Privy Council was this: could the same happen to Elizabeth? They knew already the answer to be a plain yes. A second question then followed on from the first: if Elizabeth were taken away from her people – by an assassin’s bullet or even by natural causes – what on earth would happen to England? The queen’s ministers felt in their bones that invasion and most probably uprisings and rebellion would follow.
Walsingham and his sources were alert to any suspicion of a murder plot. One such conspiracy came to the attention of the government in 1585 in the form of an anonymous report written upon a single sheet of paper; it had neither date nor signature nor really any clue to the identity of the writer. The official who read and endorsed the paper called it simply ‘The speeches of a friar in Dunkirk’. This friar had talked to the English agent about a plot to kill Elizabeth. If, he said, that wicked woman ‘were once dispatched and gone’ all Christendom would be in peace and quietness. The friar took the agent into his chamber, where he kept a picture of the Prince of Orange’s murder. Orange’s killer, said the friar, was a native of Burgundy. ‘Behold and see well this picture,’ the friar had said to Walsingham’s informant: ‘Look how this Burgundian did kill this prince. In such manner and sort, there will not want such another Burgundian to kill that wicked woman and that before it be long, for the common wealth of all Christendom.’
Elizabeth’s advisers were not prepared to sit passively by in the face of threats like this, for in the killing of the queen and in Mary Stuart’s claim to the English throne they confronted the nightmare of Protestant England’s destruction. They acted in October 1584. At Hampton Court Palace Elizabeth’s councillors put their signatures and seals to a document that had been drawn up by Burghley and Walsingham. It was called an Instrument of an Association, a ‘bond of one firm and loyal society’ whose signatories swore vengeance on anyone who tried to harm the queen. If any attempt were made upon Elizabeth’s life, the object of the Association was to bring to justice any pretender to the throne. The Queen’s advisers knew that the greatest danger came from Mary Queen of Scots and her supporters, and so to force home a political point they made Mary herself sign the Association: she, too, swore to protect Elizabeth’s throne. Given little choice in the matter, the Queen of Scots put her signature to a French translation of the following words:
we … do voluntarily and most willingly bind ourselves every one of us to the other jointly and severally in the bond of one firm and loyal society, and do hereby vow and promise before the majesty of Almighty God that … [we will] pursue as well by force of arms as by all other means of revenge, all manner of persons of what estate soever they shall be, and their abettors, that shall attempt by any act counsel or consent, to anything that shall tend to the harm of Her Majesty’s royal person. And we shall never desist from all manner of forcible pursuit against such persons to the uttermost extermination of them, their counsellors, aiders and abettors.
Revenge would be taken against any ‘pretended successor’ to Elizabeth’s throne ‘by whom or for whom any such detestable act shall be attempted or committed’. The challenger could be hunted down and executed by the signatories of the Association for a conspiracy engineered on his or her behalf. If that challenger happened to be Mary Queen of Scots herself – either in a conspiracy instigated by her directly or merely upon her behalf by someone else – in subscibing to the Association Mary had pretty much signed her own death warrant.
The Association was a remarkable document which Elizabeth resisted, knowing well enough its implications. But in 1584, unlike in the parliament of 1572, the Privy Council got its way. As extraordinary as the Instrument was the statute parliament passed in 1585 to put the Association into law, the Act for the Queen’s Surety, which sought the ‘surety and preservation of the Queen’s most excellent Majesty’. As Lord Burghley wrote: ‘for the Queen’s Majesty’s safety … authority may remain after the Queen’s Majesty’s death to punish and take revenge upon any wicked person that shall attempt to take her life away’.
The language of the statute was, like any Tudor act of parliament, stodgy. Its implications, however, were stunning. In the event of a rebellion, an invasion, an attempt on Elizabeth’s life or anything at all ‘compassed or imagined, tending to the hurt of Her Majesty’s royal person by any person or with the privity of any person that shall or may pretend title to the crown of this realm’, a commission of at least twenty-four privy councillors and lords of parliament would sit in judgment on the evidence and pronounce a sentence. This sentence would be put into a royal proclamation by which, under the authority of the statute and with the queen’s ‘direction in that behalf’, all forcible and possible means would be used to hunt down and kill every ‘wicked person by whom or by whose means assent or privity’ the invasion, rebellion or act against Elizabeth was provoked, as well as ‘all their aiders, comforters and abetters’.
Out of this dense language of the law came two startling propositions. The first was that in the event of a national emergency the execution of royal justice would be entrusted to the signatories of the Instrument of Association. Any pretender to Elizabeth’s throne – and the likely pretender was Mary Queen of Scots – could be pursued to death for any conspiracy organized in her name. This was licensed revenge, pure and simple. The second proposition was that royal government would continue even after Elizabeth’s murder. It was a proposal for interregnum, for a temporary English republic in the name of the continuity of royal government.
To bring her to justice under the act, the commission would have to prove that Mary Queen of Scots had at least ‘privity’ of any conspiracy: that is, private knowledge of or complicity in it. Elizabeth’s government would have to possess material proof that Mary was actively involved in any plot against her cousin or her cousin’s kingdoms of England and Ireland. Elizabeth’s advisers believed, of course, that Mary was already guilty, however clever she was at hiding her tracks. But what they needed according to the law passed by parliament was the evidence to prove her involvement and complicity in plots against England. That is what drove Sir Francis Walsingham and his men in their investigations in the years after 1585. At last, in the Babington Plot of 1586, they found it: not exactly in Mary’s handwriting but, as the following chapters will show, in documents conclusive enough to allow the government to eliminate the Queen of Scots for ever.
The conspiracy of the priests of William Allen’s mission; the efforts of Allen and the Duke of Guise to press for an invasion of Scotland and England; the power of the cause of Mary Queen of Scots to inspire Catholics at home and abroad; the fear of Queen Elizabeth’s murder; the drastic emergency contingencies of the Instrument of Association and the Act for the Queen’s Surety: all of these themes and forces singly and collectively made the years of the 1580s profoundly challenging for Elizabeth and her government. There was a powerful feeling of anxiety and isolation, of imminent catastrophe. Elizabeth’s advisers knew that the queen’s life, upon which the security and peace of kingdom and religion rested, was a delicate thing. Ministers like Lord Burghley and Sir Francis Walsingham believed that only a passionate and ruthless vigilance could save Protestant England. These were suspicious and dangerous times for the spies and intelligencers of England and Europe.